Secrets To Building Instant Credibility With Media Exposure From The Publicity Guy Andrew O'Brien

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All right, welcome back to the show. This is Brad Costanzo and today's episode is all about publicity and using mass media to get even much more attention than you could potentially get with paid media. Now, I'm a huge fan of paid media and I think it's the best way to controllably scale a business. And when I say controllably, I mean it's under your control, obviously, right? You, you pay for attention to your, to your business or your website or your brand. And the only problem with that is that sometimes if you run out of money or you're not starting with money, there's only so much you can do. However, I've always been a big fan of using very smart publicity tools and techniques to get the word out about yourself. And today I reached out to Andrew o', Brien, who is known as the publicity guy. It's a pretty good brand, it's pretty self explanatory to bring him on the call today and chat with him about what makes publicity A, so powerful and B, I'm gonna ask him to share some really cool strategies that are out of the traditional norm that you might be thinking of. Because if you're listening to my show, there's a very good chance you're a big fan of direct response marketing. And one of the things about publicity is it's not pure direct response play. It's been around probably longer than direct response. But that being said, I want to dive into some of the stuff that's working so that at the end of this podcast, you, my dear listeners and me will have some tactics that we can go apply in our business right away and not just, not just theory or fluff. So with that being said, Andrew, are you with me?

I am here.

What?

Cool.

Well, it's good to have you on the show, man. This has been a topic I actually haven't covered this much. I may have done an episode about this in the past couple years, but I can't remember. So I'm really interested to kind of hear your story, your perspective and everything else. But tell me. So you're in Austin, right?

Yes. Yeah, I am.

So how long? Brief Background, how long have you been in the publicity game and what got you there?

So I've been in the publicity game for about going on four years, three years for myself and going on a year for everybody else. And what got me into it was I was a, I was a public speaker for a few years. Actually. I became the most requested public speaker by the United States military. And what I realized during that time is in order to get more speaking engagements, more people needed to know who I was. And I didn't really have a budget for, you know, Facebook advertising or anything like that. So I needed to get the word out in a different way. So I went the media route. I did it without a PR agent, I did it by myself. Learned a lot of mistakes over the past few years of how I did things wrong, what I did right. But in the end, I ended up being featured on over 70 global media outlets. So places like USA Today, MSNBC, Al Jazeera, Huffington Post.

Fox, ABC, CBS, NBC, I've been on all of them. And it was because I actively researched and actually actively went out and got it. And the media led into me actually getting the opportunity to speak at some pretty cool places. I was able to speak at places like the White House, the Pentagon, Health and Human Services. I got to speak at some, some really cool places. And it was all thanks to the amount of exposure I got for myself.

What was the primary topic speaking on?

My topic was post traumatic stress and suicide prevention for the military.

Okay, cool.

So I, I really enjoyed it and it just showed me the power of media and I wanted to be able to help other entrepreneurs be able to tap into that power as well and use it to scale their business.

So you now you have an agency, is that correct?

Yes, it's more of a boutique firm more than an actual big agency.

Right. Okay, nice. And.

You help people like you've helped former guest and a friend of mine, Russell Brunson on the show. You work with him, publicity. You've worked with a lot of other people. Is there a, is there a type of business or industry that has been your sweet spot of helping folks? Because I, I believe that you can probably help a lot of people depending upon, you know, what business they're in, whether they've got a physical product or service or a consultant or anything like that. But has, have you, has there been a sweet spot for you?

For me, when it comes to my done for you side, that's definitely more of.

A level players. People who have a pretty well known name are pretty big in the market can afford our services. So our done for you side is more towards people who are more of a proven concept instead of a theory. For example, startups are theories, right? They're not a proven concept yet. So we usually work one on one with people who are already a proven concept. But saying that there's definitely, I mean we've got, we work with everybody, we have ways for everybody to work with us, whether it's trainings or anything like that. But anyone can get in the media. You just have to have the right story and the right angle and get a hold of the right person.

All right, well, cool. So let's jump into it. So first address what most people think of when they think of publicity and press and media as well as, you know, the kind of some of the effectiveness of your style or actually let me back up on that. What do most people, when they come and think of publicity, what do they think of?

Most people think of trying to make yourself look better than what you really are. So there's, I call it the superhero complex. Where you're trying to act like if you were on Facebook and you see that 22 year old talking about how rich he is in Bali, right? When Bali's cost of living is half of what it costs to live in Austin.

So it's more of let's make myself look amazing and let's hide all the, all the bad things.

Yeah, it's the biggest mistake. People, people don't want to hear how amazing you are because it makes it seem unrealistic that they'll ever make it to that level. But when you open up about, when you shine some light into those dark closets that you're trying to hide everything in, that's when the audience actually engages with you and that's when you actually get an ROI out of publicity and is when you actually engage in your transparent on your mistakes, on your failures, instead of trying to act like you're some superhero that's never done anything wrong.

Okay, so how do you do that using publicity?

What you do is you get out there and you spread a story not just on how awesome results you get. Like as the publicity guy, I can go around talking about how I get 20 interviews a month and it's amazing. But instead the story that I share the most is right when I started this company, I had to borrow $800 from my brother to pay my mortgage because I was about to be evicted. And the next week I made $60,000 in sales, easily was able to pay my brother back the $800. So I share that story because I'm not just trying to sit here and act like a superhero. I'm trying to build a bond in a relationship with my audience. When you share something that they can relate to, something that, that makes them feel normal and protected and like, okay, he's been the same place I've been, or I currently am, that's when you actually get engagement and people follow up and actually build a relationship with you. And relationships are key. No matter what type of marketing you're in, people buy from people they know like, and trust.

Absolutely. And I know publicity helps do that a lot. In a moment, I want you to share kind of what like, a really successful full publicity campaign might look like, because I know that, like, I've had things featured in, you know, various higher profile websites, and whether it's the HuffPost or whether it's here and there, and that alone never created a spike in website traffic or sales. And it's just kind of like, you know, done by itself. It's kind of like a thud factor. Like, all right, so what? Almost like if you write a book and nobody buys it, or there's nothing, no publicity or, or no action generated around it, it. It's like, who cares? So with, with some publicity, especially, so. So I'm a consultant. I also own a physical product company. I work with companies who need publicity, etc. Let's talk about some of the more effective publicity strategies and campaigns that people can run.

Yeah, the biggest, the biggest thing is people think of publicity like, oh, I'm gonna get in Forbes and I'm gonna get tons of leads because I was in Forbes. Right? Like, I use Forbes because that's what everybody always requests. No matter who I talk to, everybody wants to be in Forbes. What most people don't realize is there's 1800 contributors for Forbes. What that means is the majority of those contributors write at least once a week. So it means on a weekly basis, forbes releases about 1800 articles in a week. So to expect that your article that you're mentioned in is going to get more leads than the 1799 other ones is not going to. Organically, it's not going to do anything for you. It'll make you feel good. It may give you a little ego stroke, but it's not going to do much as far as lead generation. So that's why I say, okay, what you do, and this is my marketing strategy, this is what I teach everybody, is what you do is you go out and you get yourself on the five largest business publications that you can get on, or if you're not in the business industry, you get yourself on the five largest publications, depending on your industry. If it's health and wellness, you go after health and wellness ones. If it's business, you go for business publications, whatever it is, and you only go on online publications. Don't worry about print, don't worry about tv, don't worry about radio. And what you do is you use those publications and you start a Facebook advertising campaign. And what you do instead, everybody's so worried about immediate roi. How do I get someone into my sales funnel, into my email list, things like that. And I don't believe in that. I think people are tired of hearing that and seeing that. So what you do is, let's say Andrew o' Brien gets on Forbes. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to target a cold audience and send them directly to my Forbes article using a program called Sniply. Yeah, I'm a. I'm a pixel them. I'm going to capture that audience. And then what I'm doing is I'm a retarget them. And most people think, okay, you're going to retarget them with the funnel. No, what I'm going to do is I'm a retarget thing with my article and entrepreneur. I'm going to do this five times. So they're going to see me in five different media outlets before I try to sell them into anything.

Right.

And what I'm doing is I'm building trust and I'm building what I call the celebrity image factor. So we control our own celebrity image. How our cold audience views us depends on how you market to them. If you're marketing to them on the beach at Bali, a lot of people know that's not real. Now, if you market to them and you show them that you've been all over the news, what you've just done is you've created a celebrity image factor with your cold audience. If your cold audience sees you as a celebrity, they're more likely to buy from you. They're more likely to look up to you, and they're more likely to open every email that you send out.

Absolutely. I agree with that and I love that. And it's for. For any of my listeners who that doesn't. They don't totally get that. It's really pretty simple. But like you said there, you know, you start off maybe sending the traffic to Forbes and sniply, whether it's snip.ly or is it sniply.com or snip.ly snip ly. Yeah. And that allows you to.

Send traffic to an authoritative website, but it goes through kind of your own link shortener, but it allows you to also drop a retargeting cookie on there. So the nice part, and this more is for my audience, Andrew, you, you get this, but let's say a thousand people clicked on Forbes. Then you're going to retarget them to your, to your Business Insider, you know, article or whatever, but you're only retargeting those thousand people who've already clicked. Is that correct?

Yes.

Yeah. So it's not like you're just throwing money at this where you can't potentially make anything back. By the time they get through this, you've probably done a, especially if they keep on clicking on these articles, you've probably done a great job of positioning yourself way, way ahead in the know, like, and trust factor, I would imagine.

Yeah. And that's, I mean, that's the biggest thing is everybody's so concerned on immediate roi. Now publicity. There is an ROI if you build this celebrity image factor with your cult audience where they look up to you. I mean, the ROI in that is insane. But, you know, something I've realized is more people are concerned about making $100,000 in 30 days versus making a million dollars in 180 days. This is a much longer process. It's not an immediate return, but the type of list that you're building. Instead of just building a list of people that has like a 20% open rate, what you're doing is you're building a list of people who are waiting to read your emails, who are excited to hear what you have to say.

Absolutely. So let's talk about, in the business world, especially for people that personal brands and, you know, want to build up this kind of credibility and authority, what are some of the things that get picked up the most? And I want to, I also want to preface this. So I saw you post on Facebook the other day, and it had, there was one line in there. You said something about.

Some of my clients or I got somebody or whatever interviewed on the same day that I pitched like Forbes or something like that. Like, because I know that a lot of times, if you're willing to wait and have patience and can wait months and months and months, you can get published, published in these things. But.

Address that, address how you're able to do it kind of real quickly because you mentioned it. You just didn't mention any details in the post.

Yeah. The most important thing is having the right story. So when you get someone excited, that's the most important thing. Now there's. I call it the three story. There's three different types of stories you've got. One is controversial, two is informative, and three is innovative. And the sweet spot is when your story has all three. So when your story is controversial, controversial pieces do great. If people are going to disagree with what you're saying, that's really good. Because what that means is people that disagree are going to share it. People that agree are going to share it. You're going to spark a conversation. It's going to go viral. So controversial is good. It's okay to make some people mad. What matters is just getting the right message out. Informative is here's some action steps. Right? Like a lot of us have seen those pieces. Here's the five steps to build seven figure business or best called informative. Here's some action steps. Innovative is how you're different and unique from someone else. A strategy or a technique that you use that no one else is talking about. So when you've got all three combined into one story, that's when the writer really wants to write it. Because if you think about it, for us as business owners, we use publicity to get more traffic. We want more eyes on our name. The writers have the exact same goal. They don't write these pieces just as a hobby. They're trying to get more eyes too. So they want a piece that's going to get more eyes and you want a piece that's going to get more eyes. It's the same goal on both sides.

Absolutely. I love that. Now, what about the difference between getting. Getting a column, like becoming a contributor, like, do you help or do you focus on having people become contributors for like Forbes and Inc. And all these other things? Or more get people, other people who are already contributors to write about you.

I focus more on getting contributors to write about my clients. I don't help with the actual getting them to become contributors. And the reason behind both of them are good. Getting both writing for yourself and having someone write about you is definitely good. But if you think about it, it's kind of like testimonials. Talking yourself up is awesome, but it sounds much better when it comes from someone else's mouth. Like, my business has grown because of Russell Brunson talking me up and telling people how awesome I am. If I go around telling people how awesome I am. That doesn't mean anything to them.

Right. Okay, so let's say one of my listeners has a controversial, informative and innovative story. So it's sweet spot, it's great. What's the first step in pitching some of these things? Well, you can use Forbes, you can use anything else. As an example should like for instance, should they try to go get written about elsewhere so they can point the Forbes writer to hey, look, other people have written about me or what's the best strategy out of the gate?

The best strategy is what you do is you contact, you find a writer that writes about your topic. So don't just find a database full of writers and send a copy and paste email to everybody and it's going to make everybody mad. Writers hate it. What you want to do is you want to research. So you go to Forbes.com, you go to the search box and put in keywords that match your business. So for me it'd be more about communications and marketing. And I would go there and see what contributors talk about communication and marketing. I'd find the ones that talk about it most. I'd read a couple of their pieces and the first thing that I do, me personally, there's two processes and it depends on financially what you want to spend. But the free process is what you do is you send them an email and you get them not really email. There's a three step process on the free side what you do, the first thing you do is you go and find their business page on Facebook and you like it and you message them. So hey, I just saw you on Forbes. I don't do it on the personal Facebook page. Everyone has a business page. So most contributors aren't paid writers. Most contributors are business owners who are contributors trying to get more exposure for themselves.

Yep.

So I go to their business page on Facebook, I send them a message talking about how awesome that article was. Um, I mentioned the title. I talk about a part of the article so they know I did my research. Then I asked them for their email, then I get it on their email and I continue the conversation there. And then my goal is to get their phone number, I want to get them on the phone and then I close them on the phone. So it's a three step process. Facebook business page to email to phone and then I close them on the phone.

Okay, so if you give them on the phone and well, let's just say the reach out process.

The message you're sending, you're. So you're letting them Know, a little like that. You did a little personal research. There's nothing worse than templates. I get those all the time. People wanting to be on my show, and they send me a templated email about them and it always gets deleted.

Then when you get them on the phone, you pitch them. Like, how quickly do you start pitching them the concept for the article? Do you just say, listen, I've got a great concept. I noticed your, I noticed your article in Forbes, and here's your some. You know.

I'm a little tough.

What I do. I get them on the phone and I, you know, I talked about, hey, I saw that you love writing about this topic. Here's the story that's controversial, innovative and informative. And more than just the story. Here's what's going to happen is if you write this story, what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be sending paid traffic to that article.

Perfect.

So I'm not, I'm not paying them to write the article. That's against the rules. It's against the rules to pay someone to write about you. So for anyone listening, never do that because that gets deleted and you just wasted a bunch of money. Yep. But what I say is, look, if you write this story, I'm going to send massive traffic to it. And that's what people care about. It's more. It's not so much. Here's this awesome story you should write about me. It's. Here's how. It's going to be a win for both of us. You're going to win because I'm going to get more eyes. I'm going to spend money to get traffic to visit this article because it's part of my marketing.

Yeah, but they love that. And it makes them look better as contributors as well. Are there certain types of contributors you go after? Because I know some. Some people work for the company. Right. And then some people are. They just have a contributing column. They don't work there. They're just doing it for exposure. Do you typically try to go after one or the other? More so than.

Yeah, I never, I never ever go after staff writers. I, in the past year have had one staff writer write a story on a client. Staff writers only want to write about people like Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Tesla, the big billionaires. Right. So I only focus on going after contributors. And also because contributors are entrepreneurs, they don't get paid to write for these articles. If they do get paid, it may be like $50 an article. So it's not like their full time job and a majority of them are entrepreneurs. It's much easier to speak to an entrepreneur as an entrepreneur than speak to someone that's an employee mindset. Because two of my team members are actually previous editors at Entrepreneur magazine and they left Entrepreneur to come work for me. And the biggest thing is, even though it's called Entrepreneur magazine, it's a very big corporate environment and they won't write about someone that no one has heard of.

Oh yeah, that makes sense when you're coming up with the.

With the angles. Well, let's talk about your current clients. Is that the hardest part to come up with the reason to pitch or is there something that's kind of more challenging? Is there a, you know, what's the hardest part about this whole process?

The hardest part is getting people to be open minded because everybody's on the immediate ROI mindset.

Are you talking about clients mainly?

Yeah, yeah, it's clients and anyone else. It's just the first question I always get, well, how quick do I make my money back?

Oh yeah.

And so, yeah, it depends on what you do with it. But the biggest challenge that I have is everybody wants to talk just about the one specific thing. So I just want to talk about my business. I just want to talk about this marketing technique I use. I just want to talk about that. But what I tell people is what you want to do. Especially when you're first starting out and you don't have exposure, you want any publicity that you can get. It doesn't have to be just on your business. For example, if I, for me, I talk about publicity all the time, but I also talk about how much I love being a dad and I talk about how much I love giving back to the community. If there's an opportunity to be on Forbes, there's. That's more about being a dadpreneur and not about publicity. I'm still gonna take that opportunity because what I'm doing is I'm building a bond with my audience. Even if it's not about my business, even if there's not a call to action at the end of it, even if I'm not getting leads from it. What I'm doing is I'm building a bond and a relationship where they're getting to know me on a more personal level than just business, business, business. And again, that helps with a know like trust.

Yeah, that makes sense. How long does it usually take? And I know this depends on the topic and the person, etc. But how long does it usually take for somebody when they start off on this plan. Like, if I, if I said, okay, I want, just like Andrew o' Brien recommended, I want to get written about on the five top business magazines or whatever or websites. What's the, what's the time expectation here? Because I, it's probably not immediate, right? Like, hey, in the next week you've got a story written about you.

Well, the time expectation depends on the time that you're willing to put into it, if it's your focus. For example, my team is what they do Monday through Friday. So the time that it's going to take for my team to do it versus a solopreneur who's got 20,000 other things going on is a lot shorter. So for my team, for example, we just signed Mike Dillard as a client and within two weeks, we had him interviewed on five of the largest business publications in two weeks. Now, the reason is because it, it's because that's what my team does every day, all day, so it's a lot easier. But now there's a difference though. Being interviewed and it going live, that varies. So the biggest, the biggest issue we've had and we solved that communication issue was every thought, okay, I'm paying for it. I'm just going to get interviewed and it'll be up the next day. What happens is the writer has to write it. It has to go to an editor. The editor has to review it and either approve it or send it back for edit. Then once it's actually approved, it has to go into a queue and then it goes live whenever they have the time for it to go live. So none of us will ever control when an article actually goes live except on Huffington Post. But I'm going to tell you right now, anyone can get on Huffington Post. Huffington Post is not a big deal anymore. Like, literally, they're approving everyone to be contributors at Huffington Post.

Yeah, exactly. Well, the good news, and it's just like, it's just like, you know, anybody can write a book on Amazon, you know, and be a publisher. The good news is to the, to the public at large, they don't know that it's. There's still some cachet to the general public.

Yeah, it's still a credibility building and it's still authority building. So I tell everybody, even if you don't have any media exposure at all right now, all you have to do is put a Facebook post up and say, hey, who in my network writes for Huffington Post and is willing to help me out I guarantee you someone on your friends list writes for Huffington.

Post now on some of these, because you mentioned being interviewed, do you typically encourage.

The contributor to do an interview with your, you know, with your client or student or somebody who's doing this versus, you know, just giving them all the story points via press release, etc. And having them kind of piece it together without you, or do you typically encourage them to get interviewed?

I typically encourage interviews. I want them to interview the client. I don't want to just send them some ideas and just, you know, I don't like emailed questions. I like for my clients and the contributor to get on the phone and do an interview that way because most of us are much better at communicating verbally than we are over text. And sometimes things can be misconstrued or whatever. So it's just easier to do it over the phone and it's, it's more of an experience that way. Here's just some more email communication.

Right? So let's say I'm a contributor and I'm, I get a, I get contacted by you or one of your employees to interview somebody. Let's just, we'll use Mike Dillard as an, as an example. Right. So what do you provide me, the contributor with so that I can do my job? Are there some suggested interview questions? Is it like a press or media kit? What do you. And the real question is, what are you asking your clients to put together so that this interview can go smoother?

Yeah, so what I have is what I call the media package form. And when people sign up as a client, they fill out this pretty extensive form where I ask a lot of questions about anything and everything they're willing to share with me. And we put it into a Google Drive Doc and we'll usually share that with a writer if they need like a lot of pictures or things like that. Like, we've had Forbes profile pieces. Those Forbes profile pieces usually need a lot of pictures. Other ones, not so much. But what I ask most of my clients to do, and my students, is you need to build what's called your media page. And there's no need for a media kit anymore. A one pager that you send over email. We have websites now. And if you go, for example, if you go to the publicityguide.com media, that's a perfect example of a media page. And what it is, it's the headshot, it's a bio and it's previous features where people can see where else you've been featured. And then it's also good if you wanted to add a photo gallery on there so they can just go on and download whatever pictures they want.

I love it. Yep. So right there, the media guy, I'm sorry, the publicityguy.com and then you have a media link so people, my listeners can go check that out. I'll put a link in the show notes as well. Okay, what about. I did have another question. So. Okay, so a really successful campaign like you kind of mentioned. Get written about, run paid traffic to it, let people see you. You like to use Sniply. There's some other sites like that I've used in the past. I can't remember offhand. You know there was once there was one tool, I don't remember if it does this now. Maybe it's called Rebrandly. Have you heard of that? Does that sound familiar?

I haven't.

So let me just as we're talking I'm going to look at this Rebrandly, maybe a Sniply.

Site. Because the one thing about Sniply is when you share it, it still says sniply.com, you know, sniply slash Forbes or whatever. So there's another one called rebrandly.com and I started to look into it and I want to say it does similar thing. I could be totally wrong on this but that you share the. It's a link shortener tool that you send it through it it drops the cookie and then it you land on the actual webpage with to where it's actually at. Forbes.com, etc. I've got to double check that. It's something I came across about a month ago and I just started looking at it. But have you found using Sniply that many people take action on the little Sniply banner that shows up.

Really use Snip. So with Sniply you can use it to track and do pixels and then you can add a little banner to pop up while they're reading the article. I don't use the banner. I just use it as strictly a pixeling tool. So I can pixel a third party website.

Right.

I don't use it to actually target people to come into my funnel. I'm not. Biggest thing is people are tired of being hardcore marketed to all the time. So I'm trying to be unique and different by not marketing to them until after they've seen me enough times.

Right. That makes sense. So and by the way I am on here, I know it sends it through. It is a link shortening tool. I don't know if it drops a pixel. That's something to look into anyway.

What is? Tell me some fun success stories of some prior clients or students of somebody who, you know, followed your advice and really blew it up.

Yeah. So, I mean, I've got two clients. Alex Charfen and Russell Brunson. Clickfunnels, both former guests on the show.

Thank you very much.

Right. And amazing people.

I love them.

Russell Brunson and Click Funnels. I've gotten them in front of over 124 million people in the last 90 days. So their name and everything has been seen. Has had the potential of being in front of 124 million people due to media exposure. Al Sharfen has been in front of over 122 million people because of media exposure. You shared something.

Sorry, I didn't want to interrupt, but you shared something the other day on your Facebook and I think it was like a quick little video or something showing something like this or it was a dashboard.

That you were using. Is there. How do you get those numbers? Like, how do you know? Because you're not. You don't. You know, how do you know it's like 124 million people? Because, yeah, you get the story out there, but how do you know that that Forbes article got viewed X amount of time? Do you get that? You don't get that data, do you?

No. So what it is, it's a third party tracking tool that publicity companies are able to use and it's very expensive. It does not cost a couple of pennies. It's very expensive. But it tracks everything as far as how many shares that article got socially, how many views it had, how many views it could potentially have. So, for example, I got Alex Charfen on an article in Adweek. That article in Adweek has potential of reaching over 2 million people.

Because that's the amount of readers that visit Adweek on a monthly basis. So it's just you. The potential is there. It's not saying too many people actually read that article. What it's saying is that that article got in front of 2 million people. So again, it all depends on how strong the story is, how good the headline is and what you're using. Direct response marketing, because like you said, paid advertising is amazing. Publicity is amazing. Both together is like a superpower. It's taking two amazing tools, putting them together and building something completely new.

Yeah, absolutely. So.

What about. Is there anybody. Are there any unique.

Stories about using this that they don't. They didn't necessarily Follow the, just the traditional. Yeah. It got in front of a lot of eyeballs. Like, do you have any like really fun, unique, like wow, check this story out.

Yeah. So there's the biggest pushback I always get is, well, I'm not known in this industry. I don't have a name, I have no recognition. Right. I'm not worth writing about. I don't have a billion dollars. So I love, I love hearing that because I've got one client, his name is Ed o'. Keefe.

I know Ed.

Okay. So he's a great guy. And Ed o' Keefe owns a supplement company and he was trying to get into the personal development world. The time collapse he discovered. Yeah, time classing. And so he had no experience in that, no recognition in that. He had a name in the supplement industry, but not in the personal development industry. Right. He has no experience, no exposure there. Well, he wrote a book and literally in two months we got him featured in Fast Company, Entrepreneur Inc. And Huffington Post. So two months we got him featured in four of the largest ones. He's the first person to get into Fast Company. And again, he has no experience in that industry, but he was able to get into four of the largest media outlets available to entrepreneurs because it's all about angles and stories and all that. And what they did is they either called him a marketing expert or they call them best selling author of Time Classing or whatever. And so what a lot of people don't realize is there's a lot of self proclaimed experts and gurus. Right? I'm the best, I'm amazing. But calling yourself an expert guru is one thing. But when you've got a third party website that people trust like Forbes, Fast Company, Entrepreneur, when they're saying that you're the expert, when they're calling you a guru, when they're calling you a marketing expert, that's, that's when it really counts versus just saying that, saying it yourself or having clients say it about you.

Yeah. Third party endorsements are really so powerful to be able to do. So for.

What are some of the easier stories to place? Are they about like personal, you know, human interest stories, journeys? Like an individual is about like the most innovative products. Is it about anything else? Is there, is there something that's easier to place than something else? Like let me give you an example because this, this would cover both, let's say you, you, your primary product is a physical product. Right. So that's potentially story worthy. But, and I know these days telling the brand story and the Owner and the founder story, etc. Is, can be equally, if not more important. So would you try to approach that with.

You know, interview the founder of this because of maybe the founder's journey in bringing this product to life or just kind of staying on the product and its features and benefits and why it's unique and innovative, etc.

So you know, that's, I've heard it called, it's called the Hero's Journey. Right. We all go through what's called the Hero's journey. Yep. And I think that the Hero's Journey is the best selling story there is.

Right.

It's not so much about the product or the service, it's about the person behind the product or service. Doesn't matter how awesome you are, it doesn't matter how the tangible results that you get. What matters is who is it that built this company and what did they go through? Because when the audience hears that, it gets them involved, it makes them feel close to it. Versus like, if I'm going to decide between going to Walmart or the corner store, the only reason I'm going to choose the corner store over Walmart is because I know the story of the owners. I know the battle they've been through to fight the big corporate people and all that. So when people connect to that personal story, for example, click funnels, I get exposure for them on how important sales funnels are for business. A lot of it has to do with Russell Brunson and how he went from his first product being a potato gun building product to creating this fastest growing SaaS company. It's more of the Hero's journey. What did he have to go through to build this amazing SaaS company?

Right. So yeah, because, and I've recently done that with another. Another business as well is taking, you know, taking the Hero's journey regarding the founder of the company and how it led to the founding of the company and then why the company is so great. And I thought that most writers probably like a, like that better anyways. There's a million products and things they can write about there and they're kind of impersonal. But you know, writing a cool story about a person is never impersonal by nature. That being said, what if.

Or do you do anything like this? So let's say somebody has not gone out and gotten five or multiple stories written about them, but they've got one. Like maybe it's on the HuffPost or Forbes or whatever. Do you ever use that as a tool when you're reaching out to new contributors and people to write about you. Like, oh yeah, pointing over here, like, check out here was an article in the Huff Post about this. And this is why, you know, you may want to write about it too. Or does that make them think, well, you've already been written about over here, I don't want to write a story as well.

No. So what I do is some media exposure leads into more media exposure. So it's like a momentum ball. Once you get that ball rolling, it doesn't stop as long as you continuously get exposure on it. So when you've got one or two on a couple of credibility building websites, I use that to get more. Now I don't, I don't aim for the same story, the same angle because they won't want to write the same angle. It's already been written about. Yeah, but when they see that other people have written about you already, it kind of gives them that comfort level where they, they feel more comfortable writing about you. Because a lot of people don't always want to be the first. So someone else, if you've gotten someone else to be the first, it makes them more comfortable to be able to write about you.

So how would you do that? Like if you've got a, if you've got an. And I'm asking it for extremely selfish reasons. Right. Because I've got this one.

This one article, it's on the HuffPost. It's really, it's not a complete soup the nuts profile, but it's a pretty good profile of the founder, who is my wife, by the way, of her company founder's story. Like where she from, where she grew up to, the challenges she had to, what led to the starting of her company called Stiletto Coffee and what it's about. So it's a, it's a really good.

Overview of her entire story. Now there are pieces you can pick out of that, etc. But let's say we take that to another media outlet and say, hey, we thought you might want to cover this, check out the story over here on the HuffPost.

Would we typically want to feed them with.

Other angles that could be covered, etc. Or let them kind of figure it out themselves?

So I always give a couple of suggestions. I always make suggestions and I always say that these are just suggestions. I'm not telling you what to write about. I'm just giving you some ideas that I thought would make sense because I've done research on your writing and I've seen you like writing about this topic. So I'll suggest a couple of headlines. I won't even tell them what the story's about, but I'll. I'll suggest a couple of headlines that may catch their attention, right? And then if the headline catches their attention enough, then they'll ask me, okay, so what. What would that story be about? And then I would walk them through that process. But the Huffington Post piece that you're talking about, that's called a profile piece, right? So that's more of here's this person, here's what they've been through, here's how amazing they are now. And. And those are great. But what I do is I'd use that profile piece and be like, so here's. Here's a profile piece on Huffington Post that they did on her. Here's some suggestions based off of this piece that we could extract out of there to write a different piece on. So we could talk about this one part where we're talking about the coffee and the benefits of it, or we can take how she overcame this to build this, you know, the mentality that she had to have. There's just all kinds of angles you can pull out of that one piece to completely create a new one.

Okay. Love it. And that's what I. That's kind of what I was thinking as well, because that recently just happened, and it made me think about, all right, well, what's the next. You know, what's the next step there? How do we leverage this for even more exposure?

Cool.

So one thing real quick on that. When I was talking about the media page, that. The media page is important because no matter if you've only been on podcasts, whatever, any media that you've ever been on needs to be on your media page, on your website, because it's just an SEO strategy. Backlinking is one of the strongest SEO tools out there. So having a media page where you're backlinking to every media outlet you've ever been featured on, even the small ones, just boost your SEO and helps you become more competitive over your competition.

100%. What about press releases? How do you use them? How do you use them? They used to be. Press releases used to be phenomenal. Used to be is the word here for SEO, because they ranked really, really well. And there was, you know, do follow links, but they have not been as effective here in the past few years because Google caught on. Do you use them and how.

So, no, we. I do not believe in press releases. We don't write press releases ever anymore. We don't do them at all. I think press releases work for very famous people who the media is constantly waiting for news from. But as far as us, you know, general entrepreneurs, I don't believe it does anything. Now there's other services out there like PR Web, where you can have a press release that goes out to like 70 credibility building websites, but it's on the back end of the website. People are catching on to that and it doesn't mean anything anymore. And it's actually causing a lot of damage because now you see people saying Essie on Fox CBS and everybody thinks that they just did a press release. Right. So I think that's the biggest waste of time and money because it may give you a little boost in SEO. But like you said, Google has caught onto it and it doesn't bring any traffic. Like no one actually sees those press releases unless you just share the link with them.

And I've noticed personally from using them, I've got a hookup with a press release service to where I know the owner very well. So I can get them out kind of at will and for free. But.

I've never really seen any action from that. And on top of that, I've noticed that.

The SEO juice from that disappears really quickly. Like sometimes it shows up in search results for the first few days, but then Google almost just gets rid of it and I can't even find the press release anymore. I'm like, wait a minute, nobody else is going after this term. It should be there and it just disappears. Almost like Google's been penalizing press releases. I could be wrong, but that it's interesting to hear you say that because it's kind of been my experience as well.

Right. But if you think about actual interviews and actual features that are done on you, those do show up first. So if you open an incognito tab and search my name, I'm on the first page of Google. And the reason I'm on the first page of Google, there's an Andrew o' Brien hockey player, there's some professors, there's.

All kinds of people with the name Andrew o'. Brien. The reason I'm on the first page and the first story I see it, yeah. The Austin American Statesman is one of the first stories that shows up. I think it's like third or fourth link down. And that was an entire piece that was written about me just in a local news here in Austin. And it went front page and it got picked up by the Associated Press. And now I'm the first page of Google, even though there's an NHL hockey player with the same name.

Right. Yeah. Because that's an authoritative website is written about you. This is one of the things that. Because I've used press, press releases, I've used guest posts, et cetera. And it's one of those things that, you know, I just call it proactive reputation management, because you never know if you're going to need it. There's nothing worse than having a name that, you know. A whole bunch of other stuff shows up. Like, I've got a pretty unique name, Brad Costanzo. I've only found one other Brad Costanzo in the entire world. But so I own the front page of front. I own Google for my name because the other guy's not a. He's not a marketer. But there's a lot of these things that you can do. And it is true, you know, you are who Google says you are. Everybody. Google's your name. Whether you're. You just meet somebody, you're going to interview them for a podcast or be interviewed or like hire somebody for a job or decide if I want to work with a coach or a service or buy a software.

You know, what Google says about you in the minds of your prospects is often true to them. So not being proactive with this, just in case you need it, is a detriment. Even if you're. If you don't have anything major to sell. It's just really, really good to be doing this, especially because that's not that that trend is not going away. Social media and.

Perception is reality, Right?

Exactly. And there's just so many liars now that people research everything now because they want to know. So I've gotten some clients who've had some pretty bad reviews and they've been on ripoff Report and things like that. And getting them media exposure is a lot more challenging because when you Google them, all you see is negative on the first three pages of Google. They're not bad people, but they made someone mad and someone went off and just spent weeks hating on them and getting things put everywhere. So it's a lot better. And if that happens, media exposure is the way to kind of make all that stuff go to the backside of it.

Yeah. Do you ever do any. Or recommend any particular search engine optimization using those.

Using those links out there, like linking to them from your own site and giving them extra juice? Or is that like, you know, if you're doing this right, those sites have enough juice. You don't even need to do Any special.

Yeah, if I, if I, if I, I definitely give strategies on it. So a big thing that I tell people is when you're interviewing and you're doing visual or audio interviews, focus on your keyword terms that you know that you need to use and use them a lot during interviews so that they are put in to the articles. You're not telling your writer what to say, but it's using a little bit of psychology. You use the words enough, they'll put the words in there and that will boost your SEO. And then again, using social media and digital or direct response marketing with those media outlets getting on that, getting on Forbes isn't going to get you on the first page of Google. With Forbes, if there's a lot of views, a lot of likes, a lot of shares on that article, then that's going to boost your SEO.

Right? Yeah, that makes sense. What about, are there any trends you're seeing in, I mean, you know, publicity in general is not a static industry, but it's been around for a very long time. And the methods and things that you're talking about, I mean, it doesn't seem like it's in a good way gonna be.

You know, going away anytime soon. But are there any new trends or new developments that are kind of coming out that you're really excited about in ways to use this even more?

The new trend is something that reporters are catching on to is what they called the false truth era. They're calling it the false truth era.

Because fake news and all that or what?

It's just good. Everybody trying to act like everything is perfect.

Oh yeah.

And that's, you know, what I keep hitting on is failure is what sells right now. Being transparent. I just a couple weeks ago I put a post on Facebook about how I had my first nervous breakdown. Never had one in my life. Just have just had one a few weeks ago. I talk about, you know, taking my daughter to the foster home on Christmas day to go give gifts to the foster children. And it's just talk about things that have nothing to do with business and have a lot to do with my personal life. Some mistakes, nervous breakdowns, refunds, chargebacks, things like that. People that normally won't talk about because black people don't want to talk about refunds. They don't want people knowing that they have to give refunds. But let's be real, we're all business owners. We've all had to give refunds at some point. So instead of sitting here trying to act like, oh, I've never had to refund anyone. I've told people I over promised when I first started this company I had to refund everybody because I made a mistake and I gave everybody their money back. So it's just being honest that that's what's really selling right now. And that's what I love about it is the full transparency of it.

Yeah, that's, that's fantastic. This is, this is the time on the show where I do ask one question which was there is. And I like to ask everybody this because I mean this is bacon wrapped business. I mean you're in the frying pan, right? So turn up the heat. What is one technique or strategy or tactic or something that you'll, you're going to reveal right now that it almost pains you to reveal because it's so good. Is there anything out there?

Oh man, I usually charge for this shit.

But.

The one technique that I'm going to give away is.

What I want everybody to do is I want them to go on to entrepreneurial loan today. I want you to go and search the keyword term that matches your business. I want you to find someone, you look to their face in the picture. Entrepreneur calm.

Okay.

And then go into the search tab and type in the search keyword that has to do with their business. And then I want you to find that you see there's a picture of a face and by their face will say the name. It will say either contributor or staff writer. You're going to avoid the staff writers and go after the contributors. What you're going to do is you're going to find a contributor that recently wrote about your topic or about something in your industry, something that matches what you talk about. You're going to go on there, you're going to find their Facebook page. If you look on, on their name, there's usually a bunch of pictures and there's a Facebook link, a Twitter link, a LinkedIn link, a website link, all that. What you're going to do is you're going to go after their Facebook. I don't use Twitter because it's just a pain. Facebook's the way to go. So I'm going to go into Facebook, I'm going to message them and here's what you're going to say. You're going to say, hey Bob, I just read your article titled this. I thought it was absolutely amazing. I loved that part when you mentioned this. I noticed you just wrote this in April. I had a few questions that asked you. Would you mind if I Send them over email. I don't want to blow up your Facebook Messenger. And what you just did using that template, and it's not a copy and paste template, actually do the research.

Using that template. What you just did is open the door. And I guarantee at least 80% of the people actually do what I just told them to do, will start a conversation with a large scale media outlet.

Nice. And then. Yeah. And then the obvious thing is you start to build rapport with them. You didn't open up with a pitch. Hey, will you write about me? Right. Questions. It's kind of a soft opening.

And then once that relationship is established.

Yeah.

What you do is you send, you send an email and you actually send questions to their email. Hey, I had a question on this part. When you said this in the article, have you seen this or did it, did it work like this for you?

Yeah.

And you end every email in a question. You never, ever, ever end an email or a Facebook message with them in a period.

Yep.

So the reason is because you end that with a question, makes them feel more intrigued and obligated to answer it.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yes. And so what they do is they'll respond to and they'll answer that question and you'll, what you do after they answer those questions and you say, oh, that's amazing. I love that. I'm gonna, I'm gonna implement that in my business this week to see what results I get. And I'll let you know how I, how it works for me while I have you. Actually, I have a story that's similar to this. And what I do is I promise that I will get, I will do everything I can to make it a top trending story and I will send a lot of paid traffic into the article. I just want to give you an idea of this story. Can we hop on the phone?

Love it.

So what you did is instead of pitch right away, what you did is you start a conversation. You made them like you because you're complimenting them, because you're asking them questions, because now they know you did your research. You're not just copy and pasting. And then you're asking them, can we get on the phone? I'm going to make sure that you win from this just as much as I do.

Yep. I love that. That's fantastic. And that's, that's a brilliant way to do it. And as I said, as a guy who's got a media platform and I get requests for people to, you know, who want me to interview them constantly that kind of stuff absolutely works. Building the relationship first, not leading with your hand out, like, hey, can you give me gimme, gimme. That's fantastic. So very good. Now the final question is, what is a nut that you're trying to crack in your business or life right now? And by a nut I mean is there any particular skill you're trying to learn, challenge you're trying to overcome, A person you're trying to hire.

A person you're trying to fire? Is there any kind of nut you're trying to crack right now besides just getting more of what you've already got? And if not, that's cool. We get to me and my listeners could potentially go, oh shit, I can help him, right?

So the biggest thing that I'm having right now is we just doubled our pricing for our done for you services and we cut our clients in half. Reason is because I'm not trying to build an entire agency, right? I'm not trying to build this big firm. I'm trying to represent a few unique A level players and then the rest will be trained. So what I'm trying to do now is build up my passive income, which is our online trainings. We do online trainings and we have high ticket live intensives where people come out and spend two days in a mansion and we go through the entire publicity training and strategy tactics with them. And that's where my focus is right now. I'm trying to create the.

Automated passive income where I just wake up every day and I see sales in my email. So we're working on that. That's the toughest nut I'm trying to crack right now. And the biggest reason behind that is I don't do low level products. And my products are in between $1,000 to $2,000 for my courses. And so that's what we're trying to figure out now is how to make that. How to be able to wake up every morning with sales coming in and not having to bring on too many done for you clients.

Right? Excellent. Okay, so. And when you don't want to create a whole bunch of low end info products.

No, I want, I want, I believe that there's a lot of value in what I offer and I realize the lower you charge, the more pains and more problems that you have.

True. Cool. So if there's anything I can do there to, you know, help you out, I'm happy to, you know, we can talk offline about this if you ever want to strategize or brainstorm, I do this Kind of stuff with my, you know, friends and clients, you know, at all times. If anybody out there listening has any ideas for Andrew, please don't hesitate to reach out to him. By the way. So where can people get ahold of you?

Best way is the publicityguide.com cool.

And then there's contact information on there. And are there any social links you want to share? Is everything on there?

Y' all can just find me on Facebook if you just look up the publicity guy, I'm pretty easy to find on all the social platforms. I'll tell you right now. My team uses every other one. The only one I use is Facebook and I only use my personal page. So find my personal page and send me a friend request there.

Perfect. All right. Well, Andrew, this has been a pleasure, man. Thank you so much for being on the show and for everybody listening. I hope that you got a lot out of this. There's so many useful things that you can literally go out and do right this minute. So do not hesitate to put that to work. And if this really resonates and you're like, man, I don't mind putting in some sweat equity, especially if I don't have the dollars to buy ads, etc. This is an awesome way to do it. And Andrew's got great done for you services. You do have some courses you can buy as well. You can find that all on the publicityguy.com if you have any.

If you guys have any questions. If you are stuck in your marketing, if there is a nut you're trying to crack and you either need to meet the right person, get the right insight or idea or strategy, and you want my second opinion on this, you can email me directly@askbradakenwrappedbusiness.com I am happy to take a look at any inquiries and requests and whether you become a client or I'm just able to solve your problem with a quick introduction or anything else, I am more than happy to see if I can help you out. That being said, thank you once more, Andrew, for joining me. And to everybody else, keep on listening to the show. Share it on social media and let me know what you like the most and I'll see you on the next episode.